As an impressionable second-grader in 1975, more impressionable than your typical second-grader, a friend one day brought me a tape of Elton John's Rock of the Westies. It wasn't a tape of Rock of the Westies, properly speaking; it was a tape of a recordplayer playing Rock of the Westies, probably in my friend's bedroom, complete with doors closing and parents calling.
I shoved the tape into my GE cassette recorder, cranked up the volume, and labored to understand something that sounded like "Yow how." I listened to Elton’s urgent voice calling out to some guy named Dan Dare, to an unnamed island girl. I heard a dizzying array of personae: a gringo in the wrong country and the wrong bar on the wrong night, a regretful lover, a street tough, an asylum inmate. I heard him imploring me to “check it out,” over and over.
Mostly, my impressionable second-grade mind was taken apart and reassembled like Lego. I knew of Elton, as most of middle America did, primarily through his first Greatest Hits from the year before. Before that, he had filtered into my consciousness through the inescapable AM-readiness of “Your Song,” "Crocodile Rock," "Bennie and the Jets," Reared in a suburban, top-40, easy-listening bubble, I knew I liked him in the acceptable ways: as a pristine melodist, as a balladeer. The man that observed me observing him on the front cover of Greatest Hits seemed elegant, impeccably dressed (as he sang years later, a certain sartorial eloquence), and cool as hell. Yet in TV concert snippets, he also looked like the wild man: oversized glasses, pastel wardrobe, impish smile, Jerry-Lee-Lewis-bent-over at the piano, stomping through one of his barnstormers, going over the top and taking everyone with him.
This is the Elton John that leaped out of that cassette recorder at me, and Rock of the Westies is still the only Elton John LP to have ever fully captured this side of the man: the bluesy, balls-out, Saturday-night’s-alright-for-fighting pub scrapper. For forty minutes, it sounds like Elton’s pursuing some interesting confluence of Mott the Hoople and the Faces. It sounds as though he bought a fifth of Jim Beam and told the expanded Elton John Band, “Fuck it, let’s rock.”
The result, even now, is thrilling. From a standpoint of pure propulsion, these songs move. The opening medley of “Yell Help,” (not “yow how,” as it turned out), “Wednesday Night,” and “Ugly” sets the tone: sit your ass down and let these songs wash over you. The guitars are thick and crunchy, front and center in the mix. The expanded instrumentation, especially James Newton Howard’s synthesizers and Ray Cooper’s arsenal of chimes, gongs, and xylophones, piles on layers previously unthinkable on an Elton album. And don’t forget Labelle, wailing righteously in the background. There is air to these songs, and space, even as they march toward the confluence of Glitzville and Desolation Row.
Rock of the Westies gets derided for the same facets I cherish, though thirty-three years on, it does sound more schizophrenic and rushed than your usual John/Taupin collaboration. Large chunks of Taupin’s lyrics still make little sense and/or contain the subtlety of a flying mallet, when they don’t border on sexism, racism, and plain old ignorance. How convincing is Elton as a street kid or a sailor? How much does Taupin know about prostitutes or mental illness, really? But Elton sings as though subtlety or sense don’t really matter, and the sheer force of the band carries him through. The momentum doesn’t let up. And Elton just plain sounds like he’s having a great time.
Doubtless there are better (read: more carefully arranged, more nuanced, more hit-laden) Elton John albums. Other albums of his make equally interesting left turns; I’m still a holdout for the minor-key, semi-rambling Blue Moves and its lyrical beelines into depression and suicide. Rock of the Westies was the second Elton John album of 1975, six months after Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and it does sound a little slapdash, unnuanced, even a little strained. But what makes me giddy about it now is what made me giddy about it then. Present is Elton the rocker, the wild man--a side we only saw hints of before, and one we’ve seen little of since.
No comments:
Post a Comment